A little-known data firm was able to build 48
million personal profiles, combining data from sites and social
networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Zillow, among others
-- without the users' knowledge or consent.

Localblox, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm, says it
"automatically crawls, discovers, extracts, indexes, maps and
augments data in a variety of formats from the web and from exchange
networks." Since its founding in 2010, the company has focused
its collection on publicly accessible data sources, like
social networks Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and real estate site
Zillow to name a few, to produce profiles.

But earlier this year, the company left a massive
store of profile data on a public but unlisted Amazon S3 storage
bucket without a password, allowing
anyone to download its contents.

The bucket, labeled "lbdumps," contained
a file that unpacked to a single file over 1.2 terabytes in size.
The file listed 48 million individual records, scraped from public
profiles, consolidated, then stitched together.

The data was subsequently
found by Chris Vickery, director of cyber risk research at
security firm UpGuard. Vickery, a well-known ethical
data breach hunter, disclosed the leak to Localblox's chief
technology officer Ashfaq Rahman in late February. The bucket was
secured hours later.

(Related) A long look at a company operating on
the fringe? Making a business of Big Brotherly surveillance. If
nothing else, the background image is worth viewing.

Diversity is a common topic of discussion for HR
teams and internal recruiters, and with good reason. Few people
question that a diverse team makes a company stronger. But finding
the right pool of candidates can be a challenge.

It's surprising where some of those challenges
come from. Many people think subconscious bias during resume review
could be the cause, and that's one of the issues. But even the way
you write your job descriptions can impact the kinds of candidates
that apply.

… Corporations have tried to combat
unconscious bias through training, but critics and even
some studies say that traditional
diversity training is the least effective means of removing bias from
hiring.

… Several applications exist that allow
companies to find candidates solely based on skills. Software like
Hundred5
allows applicants to take a skills-based test, and those that score
the lowest are weeded out of the pack of potential hires before
anyone can make assumptions about gender or race.

… Similarly, platforms Pymetrics
and Gapjumpers
use online surveys and quizzes without demographic information
attached. Applicants answer questions on Gapjumpers, what they call
"blind auditions", and employers review the answers to
decide if the applicant is worth pursuing. According to their
website, Gapjumpers sees women making up 60 percent of the top
performers in blind auditions.

Pymetrics combines neuroscience games and AI to
match people with jobs. After roughly 20 minutes playing
behavior-based games, the AI matches the results with the profile of
a position. If there is a match, the applicant moves on to the next
round.

Linkedin –
The Skills Companies Need Most in 2018 – And The Courses to Get
Them

Linkedin Learning Blog: “Whenever there is
change, there is opportunity. With report after report showing the
world of work changing
faster than ever today, it’s fair to assume there’s more
opportunity than ever. The challenge? It isn’t easy to know where
that opportunity exists. If only some organization with the
resources necessary to answer that question could release a roadmap…
Well, consider this is your roadmap. Using a combination of
LinkedIn data and survey results, we determined both the soft and the
hard skills companies need most. And then we provided LinkedIn
Learning courses that teach those skills, which we’ve made free
for all of January 2018…”

[As I
read their course descriptions, it looks like they actually offer
First Month
Free. Bob]

You can think of Grasshopper as an app that
teaches you how to code in Javascript similar to how apps like
Duolingo teach you how to learn a foreign language. After signing in
with your Google account, you will be walked through the basics of
programming and given several quizzes. As you continue on, you will
be given more subject matter to learn and exercises to help you
retain the knowledge.

… My one real hope is that as Grasshopper
grows, the Google developers working on the app will add new
programming languages for users to learn.

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.